The Pillars of Hercules

But life went on. The old town of Zadar was not large, and it was contained within a high wall—shops, cafes, restaurants, a theater, some churches. The churches and most other buildings in the town were sandbagged, up to fifteen or twenty feet; but they were also damaged. There were many gun-toting Croatian soldiers in the streets. They were unkempt, they had long hair, many wore earrings, some of the soldiers looked middle-aged, and none of them was particularly healthy. They were pale and harassed, like the Zadar civilians.

In the Hotel Kolovare refugee families killed time in the lobby—there was nowhere else to go, and this was now everyone’s parlor. They looked without curiosity at me. Old men dozed in the lobby chairs, children chased up and down the corridors. They were overexcited, they were crazed, ashamed. The room doors were left open, so I could see women doing their laundry in the hotel bathtubs, and dishes in the bathroom sinks, and ironing boards and household goods stacked in the bedrooms. There were whispers, and shouts. Life went on, but the moods were strange.

There was a cluster of small shops and cafes in the residential part of town, about fifteen minutes from the hotel. “Residential” gives the wrong impression, though. The houses were dilapidated; many were scrawled with graffiti, or had broken windows. Some attempts had been made to grow vegetables in the yards. The apartment houses were in the worst shape of any. I walked there to look for a newspaper, but found nothing to read, though there were girlie magazines hung from clothespins along with comic books.

At a cafe I ordered a cup of coffee. A rock song was playing.

Take your bombs away

So we have today

“Is that a local group?” I asked the young woman behind the counter.

“It’s English—must be American,” she said, and handed me my coffee.

It was none that I recognized, and they were wartime sentiments.

“You’re American?” she said.

“Yes. And you’re from Zadar?”

“No. My town is Zamunike,” she said.

“Is that very far away?”

“Twelve kilometers,” she said, and sounded rueful. “I can’t go back there. I am a refugee here in Zadar.”

Twelve kilometers was only about eight miles. Still, her house was behind Serbian lines, and that was another country, with a sealed and dangerous border.

“The Serbs are there.”

“In your house.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s awful.”

It amazed me—the nearness of everything: of war, of shelling, of nastiness, of dislocation, even of comfort, for the Italian shore was just across the water, and the stately solemnities of Trieste just up the coast. Zadar was a town which had been besieged and then abandoned. But the enemy was only a few miles away. Refugees had fled here, and no one really knew where they were or what was coming next.

We talked awhile more, then an odd thing happened. When I gave her money for the coffee she refused it. She put her own money in the cash register.

“It’s a little present,” she said.

She did not let me insist. And I was moved. Since beginning this trip months before in Gibraltar it was the first time that anyone had given me anything that could be described as a present. Most of the time I was hardly noticed. I had passed through the Costa Brava and the Côte d’Azur, and Barcelona and Marseilles and Monaco. Nothing came my way. I had to travel here to find a token of generosity, from a skinny woman in a cafe, in a town full of shell holes, in the shadow of a war. Perhaps war was the reason. Not everyone was brutalized; war made some people better.

• • •

My map showed a railway line that went south to the coastal city of Split. It went farther than that, continuing through Montenegro to the Albanian border and beyond, deep into Albania. But a map was not much good here—maps are one of the casualties of war, the single purpose of which is to rewrite them. This was especially true here on the fuzzy border of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was in fact occupied by Serbian soldiers who were attempting to capture and so obliterate Bosnia-Herzegovina. They had tried and failed in Croatia: the shell holes in Zadar were proof of that.

There were many more shell holes in and around Šibenik, which I reached on a bus, because none of the trains were running, for of course they passed through Serbian lines. The bus left Zadar and stayed on the coast road, the choppy Adriatic on the right and pale gray boulders and cheese-white cliffs on the left. Soon we were in a landscape that resembled the Corsican maquis, low fragrant bushes and an intense litter of big stones, some in piles, some forming walls, the whole place weird with them.